Odd Lots

Where have I been? Chasing eclipses and home improvement contractors, for the most part. We found that a lot of people will cut down a diseased tree. The tricky part is finding someone who can dig up the stump. Also, I've been posting very short items on Facebook that in ancient times (Contra is now 19 years old, after all) would have been separate Contra entries. Finally, I've been out of sorts for other, darker reasons. (See below.)

I will post a long-form entry on the recent total solar eclipse once my colleagues and I put together a cloud site for sharing our photos.

The sugar industry bribed Harvard University researchers to shift the blame for obesity from sugar to fat. Here's the backstory. I guess it wasn't all Ancel Keys' fault. He had lots of help from some very high places. As a direct result of that bribery, millions of people grew diabetic and died sooner than they should have. How can we guarantee that such things will never happen again? I'll hear your suggestions if you have them; I'm preparing a longer Contra entry on the topic.

From the Words-I-Didn't-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Sortilege, meaning divination (i.e., the prediction of the future) by the drawing of an item or items from a collection. This includes the casting of bones or dice. I always understood this as cleromancy, but as I've discovered, every damfool item in the occult toolkit has at least six names.

There is now a service that will test you for genes specifically affecting nutrition, and provide advice based on the results. This includes things like food sensitivities and ideal diet. Yes, I'm skeptical, but at least we've begun to move away from the "one advice fits all" fallacy. The more I research, the more I discover that individual differences matter crucially in almost every facet of human health. This has various implications for healthcare, none of them good.

No, I don't generally cover such political ructions here, but this recent violence rattled me a little, and brought to mind China's Red Guards of the 1966-1975 timeframe. Want Red Guards? Because Antifa is how you get Red Guards.

Trees?http://www.alyourtreespal.com/ does all our work. Fixed up my grapefruit tree, took out my problem palm trees. They trim my palms. They also take out the stumps! Super clean up when they are don.

I’ve seen lots of videos of your tribe hitting people over the head with bike locks, broken bottles, and so on, so it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility. And yes, such behavior upsets me, granting that this particular single instance was a hoax. I’ve seen loads of others that were not hoaxes, and so have millions of other Americans who take exception to that kind of behavior.

“Worse things happened for a photographer at the Antifa riot in Berkeley the following day. As black-clad anarchists swarmed the city to attack anyone they thought might be a Trump supporter, they set their sights on a cameraman for the offense of taking their picture.

Antifa chased the man down and beat him bloody with clubs. Police eventually came to his aid and had to help him stand up and walk after the thrashing.”

You want Republican domination of America’s governments forever? This is how you get Republican domination of America’s governments forever.